A little over two months since the release of the first-person shooter video game “Mafia 3” on the gaming consoles and the PC, the negative reviews still keep coming.
Many critics have pointed out that “Mafia 3” falls a bit flat a few hours into the game and was not able to sustain its terrific opening salvo, reports Forbes.
It has also become pretty obvious very early that “Mafia 3” becomes repetitive because there was not a ton of mission variety that most of today’s first person shooters are normally peppered with.
If there is any consolation to “Mafia 3,” it had a great time period featuring old cars and the kind of music of the era.
Some critics believe that the game would have been better if game developer Hangar 13 patterned the game after the popular “Uncharted” or “The Last of Us” video game series rather than force itself as a protege of the commercially-successful “Grand Theft Auto (GTA)” franchise.
“Mafia 3” should have been a game that prioritized its complex and interesting cast of characters. It should have been a game that picked gamers up with that great opening segment and then never let go afterward, propelling the story of revenge forward toward its harrowing conclusion.
But instead, gamers cooled their vengeful heels and go about setting up a crime empire first by carrying out largely the same type of mission over and over again.
Glory and pain of game development
“Mafia 3” is a great example of the glory and pain of game development. The ambitious title took years to make, with the initial effort focused on crafting the right character, place, and historical context for the tale about the newest gifted anti-hero in the Mafia series, Lincoln Clay, details Venture Beat.
Clay is a mixed-race Vietnam veteran who goes after the Italian mob in a fictional version of New Orleans in 1968, during the height of racial and war tensions in the United States.
“Mafia 3” creators are proud of what they have accomplished, which some have described as a cultural milestone for games. But they acknowledged also that they hit both limits and trade-offs as they brought their game to the finish line
The story was powerful and unflinching in its depiction of racism in the Deep South, but it was difficult to like many aspects of the gameplay.
Ambitious and laudable goals
While the goals of “Mafia 3” are ambitious and even laudable, its effort to tell a serious story about race should have been backed up well by excellent gameplay. Unfortunately, it was not the case.
For all of the writing attempts on “Mafia 3” to do great things and push the genre forward, the game design or gameplay is simply trapped in the open-world conventions of the past five years.
It was clear that the stale foundation is not strong enough to hold the weight of the words of “Mafia 3” even if they are words that are worth hearing.
Game developer Hangar 13 has embedded that open-world fluff into every corner of “Mafia 3,” and into its very structure. What this leaves is a game that wants to forge a deeper, more serious narrative, but a gameplay that depends on constant repetition of less meaningful tasks.
Developed as a historical documentary, “Mafia 3” tells the story of Lincoln Clay, a Vietnam War vet who returns from combat to find his home city of New Bordeaux caught up in a struggle between various underworld crime organizations.
After an exhilarating first few hours that include a bank heist mission played out between flashbacks, Clay sets out on a path of vengeance, vowing to kill everyone between himself and a rival mafioso leader.
What sets the events of “Mafia 3” apart is the element of race: Lincoln is black, and in a southern U.S. city in the late ’60s, that means everything.